Arizona Public Service scales investment in IIoT based PdM with Petasense

APS scales from pilot to full deployment at three power plants, wirelessly monitoring all rotating assets.

SAN JOSE, Calif., August 27, 2019 — Arizona Public Service (APS) announced that they have significantly scaled their investment in wireless PdM (predictive maintenance) with Petasense, a Silicon Valley based venture-backed leader in Industrial IoT. Petasense provides the ARO system (Asset Reliability and Optimization), an end-to-end system that includes plug-n-play wireless sensors and predictive analytics software that helps plants gain real time insights into the health of all their critical assets.

After a successful pilot in 2018, APS doubled down on its investment to fully monitor three power plants in its fleet of eight combined cycle power plants. With this investment, APS will now monitor over 1000 balance of plant rotating machines that support over 2,500 MW of power generation using wireless vibration sensors and predictive analytics software from Petasense.

Arizona Public Service is the largest electric utility in Arizona, with 6,300 MW of generating capacity and serving 1M customers in over 11 counties in the State of Arizona. In 2018, APS deployed Petasense’s wireless ARO (Asset Reliability & Optimization) system in the Sundance Power Plant in Coolidge, AZ to monitor over 300 balance of plant assets. Sundance is an peaker plant that helps APS meet the increased demand from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) market, a market that it entered in 2017.

“Reliability of our power plants is in the foremost on our minds,” commented Don Lamontagne, Supervisor of Equipment Reliability Engineering at APS. “If we are not able to generate power when it is needed, we are not just faced with loss of revenue but also fines. This technology solves what has historically been a major problem – ensuring the uptime of our balance of plant assets.”

The Petasense ARO system provides a machine learning driven asset health score that helped detect 14 critical failures in 2018. APS would have missed catching these with their manual walk-around vibration analysis program. APS also integrated Petasense with existing systems to combine real-time asset condition and process information. This helped APS build the business case for expansion of the program to two sister sites, Redhawk and West Phoenix.

“We are really excited to see APS scale their deployment. This demonstrates how real-time asset health insights can positively impact a utility’s business,” stated Arun Santhebennur, Cofounder at Petasense. “The APS team has shown a true commitment to transforming traditional maintenance practices, and this investment shows their role as an innovator in the power generation industry.”

Petasense is a Silicon Valley-based, venture-backed, IIoT company that was founded with a mission of democratizing and simplifying Industrial IoT. The Petasense ARO system includes plug-and-play wireless sensors and machine learning analytics based software to help plant operators gain insights into the health of their assets anytime & anywhere. Clients include industry leaders like Barrick Gold, APS, C&W Services, JLL, Exelon and Silicon Valley Power.